Sample-Driven Inspections

The main objective of software inspections is to find faults in software artefacts. The benefits of inspections are reported from researchers as well as software organizations. In some studies, the fault detection in inspections has shown to be more efficient than other validation and verification activities. A problem, however, is that inspections sometimes are not as efficient and effective as expected. The reason may be that the software artefact inspected contains few faults. In addition, when a software project runs late, inspections are often not properly conducted. This leads to that many faults are not detected, valuable time is lost and people’s trust in inspections is affected negatively. SampleDriven Inspections (SDI) provides a solution to these problems. The concept of SDI uses sampling, inspection and resource scheduling to increase the efficiency of an inspection session. SDI uses a pre-inspection phase in order to determine which artefacts need more inspection time, i.e. which artefacts contain most faults. The second phase of SDI is a main inspection with a special attention on the artefacts with most faults. In this paper, the SDI method is described and empirical evidence is provided, which indicates that the method is appropriate to use. A Monte Carlo simulation is used to evaluate the proposed method. Furthermore, the paper discusses the results and important future research in